


they named a city after us

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: ain't licked yet [9]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Format: Movie Review, Future Fic, Gen, Kent makes a movie about Jack, Kent premieres a film at Sundance, documentary fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:29:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7646674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>The Zimmermann Story</em> has left audiences hopeful that in the world of film, this is only the beginning of the Kent Parson story. The film received the Special Jury Prize for Verité Filmmaking at Sundance and is scheduled for a wider release in March.  For more information about the movie or to find tickets and showtimes, visit the filmmaker’s site at www.kentparson.com</p>
            </blockquote>





	they named a city after us

**Author's Note:**

> _Ain't Licked Yet_ is a series being written irregularly and out-of-order, about Kent Parson's career-ending injury and what happened after.

* * *

##  **More than a Hockey Story: Parson Makes Stunning Sundance Début**

_Far from a standard adulatory sports biopic, Kent Parson’s documentary_ The Zimmermann Story _about his best friend and fellow Stanley Cup winner is a stirring postmodernist wonder-tale_

The first three minutes of _The Zimmermann Story_ were what everyone expected when they heard Sundance Film Festival was premiering a hockey documentary by NHL star-cum-filmmaker Kent Parson.  It’s June 6, 2022 in Vancouver, Canada, fifth game of the Stanley Cup finals, and the score is tied 3-3.  With slickly-edited TV sports footage to set the scene, Parson invites us into the visitors’ dressing room, where his camera alone records the debate hockey legend Jack Zimmermann is having about being allowed back onto the ice despite his broken wrist.  "Just strap it up,“ he pleads, showing us his chiseled jaw and heroic profile.  "You have to let me go out there, Coach.”

Every hockey fan alive knows what happens next: the goal Zimmermann scored to win his third National Hockey League championship has entered sports legend, along with the six months of physical therapy it took for his wrist to heal.  But in the documentary, as with the game, it’s what happens next that sets _The Zimmermann Story_ apart.

In the comfortable gloom of an indoor skating rink, 37-year-old Eric Bittle glides through a series of figure skating spins.  "Hockey was always a backup for me,“ he says on voiceover.  "It’s what I did to stay busy when my parents couldn’t afford figure skating anymore. So sometimes it’s hard for me to remember just _how_ passionate Jack is about it, because some part of me is thinking—it’s just hockey. It’s not actually worth getting too worked up about, you know?”

“That’s why you’re good for me,” Zimmermann’s voice interrupts his husband of eleven years, while onscreen he comes into frame, skating slowly enough to pull their 3-year-old daughter Suzy along as she clings to the blade of his hockey stick.  When she clamors to be picked up Bittle props her on his hip and spins again, much to her delight.  "I get too stuck in the game. It helps me to have someone always saying, ‘It’s just hockey.’  Because it is.  It’s just hockey.“

The film is full of such juxtapositions.  Bittle is one of a cast of characters who make up the Zimmermann story whose parts are already known to Zimmermann aficionados, but under Parson’s careful gaze their roles—the supportive hockey husband, the doting father, the adoring teammates—begin to unravel.  With stunning empathy he probes into their relationships with, and feelings about, the personas their positions in Zimmermann’s life has forced upon them.   _The Zimmermann Story_ is not a narrative as much as a deconstruction of it.  Against the linear backbone of his professional hockey career, we get an inside look at how the legend is made.  The film’s subtextual narrative is about a conspiracy of people diligently using hockey’s cultural prominence and their position inside it to change the public story on issues like sexuality and mental health.

Interview footage from Jack’s early NHL career, for example, intermingles with his future-husband’s college video blog entries and Parson’s behind-the-scenes footage of how Zimmermann and Bittle carefully planned a two-year multiplatform social media campaign of seemingly careless remarks, tweets, and media appearances before taking their relationship public.  "They’re gonna write a song about us,” a 21-year-old Bittle explains to then-Falconers assistant GM Georgia Martin during a media image strategy session.  "We might as well give them the music.“

Zimmermann’s public narrative is all the more impressive after the revelation that it is the product of meticulous re-invention.  Rather than rejecting what he considers his unearned notoriety as the son of a hockey legend, he uses that legacy to champion causes spanning from gay rights to mental health to affordable sports programs for low-income families.  Every selfie and press conference is a Millennial gesture of autonomy.  Although he has long been criticized by the media for being stand-offish and uncommunicative, Zimmermann is revealed as a man who has been trying for years to tell the complicated truth about who he really is.

Parson himself remains a bit of an enigma.  The film eschews a single narrator in favor of media broadcasts and intimate, unscripted conversations.  The film offers no explanation as to _why_ he and his camera are a fly on the wall on Jack’s apartment for the 2016 Stanley Cup playoffs, even though he has admitted in interviews that he began filming his friends as a way to cope with his career’s sudden end the previous year due to an on-ice concussion.  Even when he does appear on camera in a scene that threatens to hijack the film completely—Jack supporting him as he struggles to skate for the first time since his stroke—the focus is on the event’s role in the narrative of Zimmermann’s career.  His silence in the mosaic of voices and stories is almost the film’s only discordant note. Footage of Eric coaching a teenage hockey team likewise feels cryptic and elusive: the man behind the camera was a driving force in founding the American Major Junior Hockey Players’ Association.  What does he think?

 _The Zimmermann Story_ has left audiences hopeful that in the world of film, this is only the beginning of the Kent Parson story. The film received the Special Jury Prize for Verité Filmmaking at Sundance and is scheduled for a wider release in March.  However, despite the buzz his film has received Parson is staying quiet about ongoing or future projects.

_For more information about the movie or to find tickets and showtimes, visit the filmmaker’s site at[www.kentparson.com](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kentparson.com&t=YjBmMmQzNjgxYWU4Y2Q1MzYwMTAyMzJhZmQxZTI2ZThjMWZmMTYwNixoUDg0MlFMZg%3D%3D)_


End file.
